Blogtober: Planning Blogposts

Hello again everyone, and welcome to day 5 of my Blogtober challenge. If you have missed my posts so far, you can catch up on the links down below:

1: Welcome to Blogtober

2: Types of Blog

3: Blog Names

4: Reasons I Blog

Today I want to take you through a behind-the-scenes process I don’t often talk about – how I plan my posts.

Planning is not a simple process and, for me at least, has multiple stages before I get anywhere near to the actual writing of the post

STAGE ONE: SPIDER DIAGRAM

Once I have had the idea for a post, I then have to set out all of the potential things I could talk about in that post. Sometimes, there are a few, sometimes there are more, and sometimes there are so many that it can be difficult for me to get my head around.

So, in order to get the ball rolling on actually writing a post, I do a spider diagram.

This is simply to get my ideas down on paper. Whatever I’m thinking in relation to the topic of the post gets put down on the spider.

STAGE TWO: ANNOTATION

Once I have put all of my ideas down on a spider, I start annotating it.

Annotations are done in a different colour (usually red or green) and in three stages.

1.       Put an ‘x’ next to anything I think might not work on the post (NOTE: I don’t cross it out just in case I want to add it back in later)

2.      Put stars or asterisks next to what I am going to put in the post

3.      Looking at the ideas with stars, I number them in the order I want to put them in the post.

STAGE THREE: BULLET LIST

Having annotated it, I then put my ideas into a bulleted list in the order set out by the numbers on the spider.

At this point I sometimes annotate again, moving things around or adding/taking away certain elements.

And after all that, I at last have a complete, organised, structured plan to work off when it comes to writing the post itself.

Of course, planning is just one part of the process of creating a blogpost, but it is for me one of the most time-consuming, but also one of the most useful things I have learned as a blogger and have applied this to other areas of my work as a result of its success here.

How do you plan your blogposts? You can let me know in the comments section or on Twitter (@TrentBlogs) if you’d like to share any of your own techniques/tips/tricks.

Blogging week continues tomorrow with another post, so keep an eye out for when that goes live. Until then though, keep positive, keep smiling, and above all, keep believing.